[Rant] Nintendo Switch, quarantine, and why deving takes ages

As some of you may know, I was (still am!) against the Switch due to its price, build quality, "lack of games", and because it's 64bit ARM which I really hate from a dev standpoint.
A few months ago one of my workmates entrusted (this is the right word to use in my case) me with his Switch for a while so I could try out Rocket League. Welp, not gonna lie it's much smaller than it looks in the commercials. It's just the worst size they could've chosen. It's too small to use the kickstand (and also the fact that Rocket League has no DPI scaling, because everyone can read 3mm text from 80cm amirite?!), but too big to hold comfortably. Also don't get me started on how flimsy the Joy-Cons felt, I was insisting on using undocked mode because I was afraid of snapping the Joy-Cons out of place >.<

Fast forward to march, when I get bombarded with ACNH just a week or so after restarting my ACNH savegame I left off at 2018/jul (ouch). Thanks to @smileyhead for just casually dropping that the Switch Lite has mushy buttons (because I was pretty open about my disgust that my workmate's Switch had Joy-Cons so bad; the buttons felt like stiffer yet mushier GBA SP buttons (which I really hate due to the strength required to press them), and the ZL/ZR buttons are even worse in that regard!), which was the "kick" in my mind to convince me to opt-in for a Switch Lite. I was already pretty much fully convinced, but still decided to ask a few questions, and despite my negative reaction towards them, I was 100% convinced to buy a Switch Lite, and the next day I did so (which is when I got my building permit in ACNL, big RIP).

Luckily the game shop of my choice is literally 2 floors below my workplace, so I was able to just travel there by train (which was not a good idea risking my life, but luckily I'm still alive). They had a yellow display model* on stock with a ~30€ price drop, and that's what I went for (the price drop was also a factor in fueling the will to buy this). The surprise was (indicated by the * star symbol in the previous sentence) is that only the box was on display, so basically I got a brand new yellow Switch Lite (but still managed to mess it up!).
Despite the lack of Joy-Con chargers anywhere, I still bought a pair of purple-orange, a Pro Controller (which I'm still really happy about, the Taptic Eng-- I mean HD Rumble feels really great!), a "dock" (which is definitely worth it, it feels much better than the kickstand on the regular Switch), and two boxed games (because I was afraid that Ninty could withdraw my rights to redownload the games I would purchase for prices slightly higher than the boxed versions). Obviously ACNL had to be the exception, not only because it sold out, but also because who the hell would wait more than half a year (or longer?!) for any cart to be in stock?! C'mon

Considering how much fun I've been having with ACNH, and the fact that I had to get it digitally, I decided to check out the eShop. Oh my... I could describe my experience being similar to content creators when Youtube replaced the old comment system with Google+, except my experience was slightly worse. Like, you'd think that they'd put effort into the place where they hope people would spend most of their money... I was wrong. This is so far the worst eShop NIntendo has ever created. It has features stripped compared to previous iterations (where is my purchase history?), it's even slower, it always freezes, it's so damn slow that the touchscreen basically doesn't even work (the touchscreen responsiveness is comparable to ACNH when playing in-game... yeah).
Also the game selection. Now I have realized why I thought there is a "lack of games". It turns out it's the lack of cartridge-based games. It seems like most of the games are just cheap shovelware (is this the Wii again? lolno, the Switch seems to have a higher shovelware percentage than the Wii), usually some anime girl titles (and sometimes BIG TIDDY anime girl titles, I'm surprised Ninty allowed LotChecking that in), and then the super-expensive football games which are the exact same game but with the date code changed.
But I don't really care much about the shovelware games, as you can just scroll past them (assuming you have the patience to painstakingly scroll past them at like 3FPS). The fact that I'm really surprised about is how some of the 1st-party games have some quality degradements. The screenshots for Harvest Moon look like they are from a super low-budget ad-ridden game! And also based on my progress in Mario Maker 2 story mode, it seems like they have the same issue. It also looks like some low-budget game with the models replaced with higher-quality versions. At least the main game is actually really nice, it's only this part where you should barely spend time anyways (as in, in the "story mode hallway").
Edit, but not really: just before I ragequited the eShop, I thought to myself "I'll be angry at the overabundance of anime girl (tiddy) games because there is no Nekopara". Welp, upon calming down I decided to search for it just for the keks, and... they are all there for 8.99GBP each... Too bad it's 100% these are the censored cut-down versions.


For those who are wondering, I won't hack/homebrew my Switch because I don't want to risk being banned, having spent so much money (and other reasons I'm not going to include), but one thing is really tempting: the Youtube app is so bad. It has touchscreen support, but you can't scroll. That's okay, I can live with it, I always just accidentally click on an unwanted video. This would be fime if the second row weren't always "Important news" and "COVID-19 news" scaremongering garbage with disgusting clickbait thumbnails, the worst part being that you can't get rid of this section due to how crude the interface is, and that once you accidentally open one video, it'll take months to years to be able to get rid of recommendations because of this one mistake (because the "I don't want to see this recommendation" button doesn't function since the new design was introduced, and the same is the case with "Don't recommend this channel to me anymore" option).

As a backstory (yet again, yay), I have actually had a really bad cold just a week before most countries were aware of this thing, which lasted more than a week (I was sick from mar/06 to mar/16). After having recovered, I noticed that my health has started to drop.
Well, it turns out that simply just walking 15m + 10m + 6m + 12m each day and eating two small pizzas (which approximately add up to a small full-size pizza), one 2.25L cola, one beer, and two filled milk bars were enough to more-or-less sustain a "healthy" lifestyle, and have your health be actually positive, and have a more-or-less good work performance. Unless you have some digestion problems (in which case my method doesn't work, sorry!) or allergies (of which I have a lot, so unless your allergies are fatal, this might work for you), this very unhealthy "lifestyle" is actually healthy enough to stay alive and be able to work

Now, it's important to know (but only for the points mentioned in this wall of text above and below) that I really hate exercise. Not because I'm so lazy (which I am), but because of the painful (and possibly fatal) side-effects physical straining causes for me. Well, it turns out that the beforementioned "exercise" played a really big role in helping to keep my health. So if you have experienced health lost (which is not caused by your mental health affecting your body) then it's most likely the lack of walks. It's important to very regularly get up from your seat, walk all around without straining yourself too much, and only then you're allowed to sit back. This is not as effective as taking a nice walk in (the hopefully) clean air, but at least it's still one step further from being a rotten couch potato

Yet another backstory: at my previous workplace I have worked from home before. It's not good.
First of all, if you're sick, stay in the damn bed (learned this the hard way)!
Second, if you don't have your life "pre-planned" as much as I do then it'll affect your health negatively to the point where you'll be barely able to work 2-3hrs until you pass out, let alone working full 8hrs each and every workday. It's physically impossible. If going on for too long, your health can drop to the point where you have to be taken to hospital to be able to start a recovery process.
Currently I'm falling into the same pit again, except that I don't really have the "luxury" of being able to just go to work, so I'm forced into home office, and I don't like it. This is the current main reason as for why I'm so slow at working on homebrew. I physically can't do more work. I can't even keep up with the 8hr shift, not even close.

But the reason before the quarantine was (and still is) is that I'm really bad at time management. Like, no grasp of the subject at all.
People who suffer from this almost always have these side effects:

• prefers to spend time on youtube
• too tired to work on projects
• too tired in general
• has an inconsistent sleep schedule, sometimes as extreme as spending 36hrs awake and sleeping 10-13hrs afterwards, every "day"
• depression higher than usual
• bad health
• "I don't have free time" syndrome

I'd say kick off the recovery process with these, in this order:

1. You know your problem, and you know how to fix it. This is the hardest step. If you can start it, you're past the hardest part!
2. Start to fix that bad sleep schedule. Just sleeping 1hr less or more has huge effect! It varies, but it's usually good to sleep between 7hrs and a bit less than 9hrs. Anything outside that range is highly unhealthy.
3. Fix the sleep schedule. Slowly but surely keep pushing the sleep schedule towards a specific time window. This can be hard depending on your situation. Even the pros (like me) can barely make any progress, so this takes the longest time. Once you found a sweet spot, strive for going to sleep in time! If something doesn't work out, retry after sleep! You have no idea how many hours I wasted attempting things tired which I solved after a good sleep...
4. Go for walks! Screw sports! If you walk at least a total of 30m a day then you should already feel your health starting to recover
5. Eat! The reason this is after the walks is because you won't (or perhaps can't) eat more if you don't go for walks. Unless eating junk food is endangering or lethal to you, you're allowed to eat junk food during the recovery period. You'll end up healthier in the long run if you put less barriers in front of you and thus recover faster.
6. Plan out your time. Here you should already feel better and less depressed. Magically every day you started to have 20-40-60-90mins of free time out of nowhere, and you've been actually using it to work on your projects Here is where you should plan out your time a bit more precisely. By planning I mean making a timetable, and naturally sticking to it. Most will just get super depressed when trying to stick to "deadlines". Play around with the timeplan to see what is good for you. You'll know if the timeplan is working because your whole body and system will adjust to it in some time, completely naturally! It's also important to keep in mind that the timeplan is just a guide, it's not the law. Deviations are allowed, but don't let yourself fall off.
7. Plan ahead for the unexpected. Even though I barely managed to get to the previous point, I know very well what I *should* do to get back on the right track. I have never been at this point, but it's something everyone should do. If you're just recovering, you'll eventually notice that any slight deviation messing with your schedule will throw you off from a cliff, and you'll have to spend a lot of effort to be able to climb back and not fall off. This is why you should plan ahead, think what could mess with your schedule, and try mitigating those as much as possible. You'll most likely have to alter your timetable to be able to accomodate these possibilities, but it's just to ensure that you could live a more normal life

It's amazing (and very terrifying) that I have homebrew which I've been developing for ages, but because of the above mentioned things they are still unreleased! And there are actually quite a few of them, and not even all of them are 3DS-related, or not even Nintendo-related, or not even a homebrew at all! I have even made original content many many years ago which are still sitting on my 80Gig HDD, most likely bitrotting away at this point, which could've been release-worthy with just an extra few days worth of work "if I had time"...